Too Many Cooks

by FINIFUGU Games

Too Many Cooks is a 3-6 local co-op party game for mobile (iOS + Android) where your team works together run a restaurant kitchen, each player using their own mobile device to chop, steam and wash their way to victory while constantly sending items and tools back and forth between the team.

Players interact verbally and are encouraged to talk, shout and employ organisational strategies to optimise their pipeline!

Thematically we used the concept of ‘bringing people/things together’ as a thread that helped to the align much of the project: the medium (mobile, most available platform), genre (co-op), theme (cooking, iconic international foods), player count (1-6, quite a big range), connection (server-based, not bound by local connections), mechanic (mostly dragging individual ingredients together).

Building off this theme always meant T.M.Cooks had to have accessibility as a core consideration in its design to reach as large of a group as possible, in particular: games exposure, age, and dexterity. This fed into our range of controls, which only include tapping and dragging - commands we hope will be familiar to anyone who has used a smartphone. We also kept core components of the game relatively large on screen to reduce the demand of dexterity. Instead, this places the emphasis almost entirely on team management, strategies and co-ordination rather than skills that might be unfamiliar to non-gamers. For example: understanding character physicality + movement, platforming and controller inputs.